The present invention relates generally to an electronic payment system, and more particularly to a system for monitoring and enforcement of an automated fee payment in an infrastructure.
Urban road congestion represents a major and growing problem in most global cities—with a worldwide associated cost estimated in hundreds of billions of dollars per year. Many cities in the world have introduced static road toll systems, but they are expensive to install and maintain infrastructures, difficult to upgrade as sensing & communication technology progresses, and inflexible in their application.
A typical electronic toll collection (ETC) system includes four subsystems called automatic vehicle classification (AVC), violation enforcement system (VES), automatic vehicle identification (AVI), and transaction processing which includes a back office and integration. It relies on a stationary infrastructure.
Bitcoin is a digital store of value and payment system. The system is peer-to-peer; users can transact directly without needing an intermediary. Transactions are verified by network nodes and recorded in a distributed ledger. Bitcoin has been proposed as a standard protocol to handle road tolling transactions.